Have you noticed that the colder the water is, the longer it takes to rinse the soap from your hands?

I can’t complain - it’s not as cold here as much of the rest of the country. But it is cold enough, especially in the mornings and evenings and nights. We tend to think we’re in the Lowveld, but we’re not. We are on a mountain 1200m above sea level. That’s pretty much the same elevation as Pretoria, and we get pretty much the same temperatures too. And it does get cold. But not like Standerton (-8/7) yesterday morning. Brrrr.

We have a bit of a family legend that my grandfather used to tell of when he was a boy. I can’t tell it correctly, I’ve forgotten the details, such as where this took place. But I think it was somewhere on the highveld in winter. He was walking one bitterly cold morning, barefoot because they were very poor, and crossing a stream he noticed the steam rising from the water. He dipped a toe into the water and discovered the water was blissfully warm, so he stripped and got into the water completely. Of course at that point he realised that the water wasn’t warm at all, it had just seemed so in contrast to the air temperature. Funnily enough I can’t remember what he did then, but I imagine it was a frozen boy who got to school that morning.